DESCRIPTION

The Table plugin allows you to format a list of data items into a virtual table. When you create a Table plugin via the USE directive, simply pass a list reference as the first parameter and then specify a fixed number of rows or columns.

[% USE Table(list, rows=5) %]
[% USE table(list, cols=5) %]

The Table plugin name can also be specified in lower case as shown in the second example above. You can also specify an alternative variable name for the plugin as per regular Template Toolkit syntax.

[% USE mydata = table(list, rows=5) %]

The plugin then presents a table based view on the data set. The data isn't actually reorganised in any way but is available via the row(), col(), rows() and cols() as if formatted into a simple two dimensional table of n rows x n columns.

So if we had a sample alphabet list contained the letters 'a' to 'z', the above USE directives would create plugins that represented the following views of the alphabet.

Data in rows is returned from left to right, columns from top to bottom. The first row/column is 0. By default, rows or columns that contain empty values will be padded with the undefined value to fill it to the same size as all other rows or columns.

For example, the last row (row 4) in the first example would contain the values [ e j o t y undef ]. The Template Toolkit will safely accept these undefined values and print a empty string. You can also use the IF directive to test if the value is set.

The rows() method returns all rows/columns in the table as a reference to a list of rows (themselves list references). The row() methods when called without any arguments calls rows() to return all rows in the table.

The Template Toolkit provides the first, last and size virtual methods that can be called on list references to return the first/last entry or the number of entries in a list. The following example shows how we might use this to provide an alphabetical index split into 3 even parts.

Data in the table is ordered downwards rather than across but can easily be transformed on output. For example, to format our data in 5 columns with data ordered across rather than down, we specify rows=5 to order the data as such:

a f . .
b g .
c h
d i
e j

and then iterate down through each column (a-e, f-j, etc.) printing the data across.

In addition to a list reference, the Table plugin constructor may be passed a reference to a Template::Iterator object or subclass thereof. The Template::Iteratorget_all() method is first called on the iterator to return all remaining items. These are then available via the usual Table interface.